(Jake
Berry’s interview where he responds to the responses can be found here)

Jake
Berry’s institutional meditation on the influence of academic publishing, the
pressures of modernism and postmodernity, and the necessary relevance of an
“Otherstream” in poetry all compel serious questions and concerns. His
recognition of the central importance of a mass audience to contemporary culture
necessarily complicates other grassroots notions of publication, creative
dissemination, and economic models of institutional sustainability. According to
Berry’s argument, large institutions determine canon formations and promote
work that will be influential in terms of the hierarchies of popular and
literary markets. Other cultural formations, however, evolve along the (choose
your metaphor) margins, borders, or frontiers of literary culture. Looking at
the production and distribution of poetry within the context of mass culture
ultimately limits the descriptions of how art circulates for private and public
uses. While some poetry does compete in the distributive networks of mass
culture, most of it is designed to extend through very different methods of
social engagement. In my response to Berry, I’d like to present alternative
notions of public space and creative participation in it, and I’ll illustrate
this with an account of one form of public encounter through poetry in
Philadelphia during Christmas 2004.

Private
audiences tend to embrace the coteries and in-groups that acknowledge contexts
outside the mainstream. For some, there’s a certain fierce pride in developing
consumer practices outside of mainstream cultural production. Aficionados,
amateurs, and those experienced and engaged in the loose affiliations of poetry
often seek out art that is decisively outside the domain of mass culture. In
many ways, this private concern for poetry enables an “Otherstream,” even as
it is buried under an enormous veil of mass concerns stemming from commodity
culture (and increasingly whatever it is displacing shopping in an era of
economic contraction). Schools of poetry, fierce group marketing efforts, and
other strategies of institutionalizing what one likes mimics larger cultural
forms of social practice. How one aligns with institutions like university
presses or smaller presses or popular presses, or the institution of prizes or
whatever, inform a kind of practice shaped by larger economic forces.

But
it’s possible to put aside the institutional worries of poetry’s circulation
in order to obtain a view of its actual services as public art. By public I
don’t mean mainstream, or mass culture, or anything like that, though, of
course, public documents do occasionally get absorbed into these recognized
spheres of social dominance. Instead, I see a public as a shared space
determined by committed participants. Poetry thrives insofar as its advocates
bring it into being for new audiences. It’s not at all important that
there’s more poetry than anyone can read; instead, what’s happening is an
intensification of the critical apparatuses that make certain types of poetry
meaningful for certain audiences. I’m not saying that advocates should
reinforce institutional goals or identities, but that they should instead seek
ways to encourage cross-pollinations between the categorical forces we are all
dealing with. To identify as “Otherstream” is to identify with a form of
institutionalization that voids the power of process, engagement, public
participation, and critical self-awareness that can form new and dynamic
possibilities. It’s far too easy to claim that the “other” cannot be
absorbed (or consumed). Otherness is a complex process, as even St. Augustine
acknowledges: the most alien parts of our souls participate in our relationships
to the world. The figure of the other in contexts of literary circulation offers
a romantic interlude, and provides only a vague, inactive description about how
new forms of poetry emerge through a careful process of advocacy and creative
innovation.

North
America and Europe are business cultures, and as such, the relationships that
motivate and extend something like contemporary poetry can often seem distorted.
Categories and identities correlate with a kind of marketing apparatus that
ignores the essential advocacy required to bring writing to a public audience.
Publics are infused with private feeling, too. A public exists as an infused
space of great potential for artists, activists, and writers. Institutionalized
forms of the public sphere manufacture a caged sense of how things stand. But an
actively imagined public that is generated through discussion, activism,
symbolic presentations, and expressive gestures gives shape and meaning to
undisclosed spaces. My point is, poetry does not exist as a category of any
kind: it resists institutional determinations even as institutions like
university presses can normalize or stabilize the chaotic blossoming of art
around us. This is neither bad nor good, but a demonstration of the capacities
afforded to our existing culture. But other individuals, participants, coteries,
and institutions develop equally compelling capacities to engage within new
cultural formations of public significance.

Let
me end with an example of one attempt by poets to make words available in a
public context, a context they in part defined and developed. Jules Boykoff and
Kaia Sand explain in Landscapes of Dissent
(Long Beach: Palm Press, 2008) how on Christmas Eve, 2004, a group of artists
entered high profile Philadelphia shopping areas to read poems, pass out
handmade greeting cards and broadsides, and to ask passersby to reflect on their
roles as citizens. Members and supporters of the Poet Activist Community
Extension (PACE)—Nicole McEwan, C. A. Conrad, Linh Dinh, Mytili Jagannathan,
and Frank Sherlock—stand, in one photo that documents their public action that
day, in front of an Old Navy department store, the ironic union of corporate
logo and idealistic poets captured briefly there. The writer-activists, bulkily
dressed for the weather, hold their books and pens. A warm but firm presence can
be validated in another photo where Sherlock and a random passerby embrace. But
their engagement on the street offers a weird testament, too: Dinh, in one
picture, wears a startling placard around his neck—“Ape Laureate.” He
reads from a poem, “Planet of the Apes,” recalling for his audience the 1968
film of the same name, wherein militarized apes overrun human civilization.
Parallel to Dinh’s reading, Sherlock passes out holiday cards. On the cover
are the words, “Peace / On / Earth,” while the interior offers a brief poem:
“There / Is / A / Road / / In / Sadr / City // Called / Vietnam / Street.”
Similarly, Jagannathan offers an “Open Letter,” asking her audience to
reflect on their cultural and moral situation in America that day: “do we
speak to the conditions or / to the winner do we speak the conditions / in our
deliberate mouths is our speaking / conditional is our love / conditionally
speaking is this love / against the stranger breaking down.” The broadside
Conrad hands out reprints a letter to President Bush that transforms political
protest into an affirmation of public affection:

I’ve
seen your fingers in person you have nice hands Mr. President and they’re your
hands not your father’s hands your life is your own it really is it belongs to
you and love is waiting I have a lot of love Mr. President and I just want to
press against you sometimes to let you get a little of it HEY i’m so serious
about this let’s go away together this spring just the two of us it’s not a
big deal don’t even tell anybody I mean you’re the president after all but
there’s a marvelous stretch of woods where I grew up we could smoke a little
pot to wind you down get you out of your oval office mode maybe a little wine
I’m sure you need a good massage maybe we could go to the creek and paint
secret mud symbols on our naked bodies like I used to do with my first boyfriend
what happens after that will be fine you’ll see it will be okay the break in
the woods has the best flowers to rest beside in the sun and you will awaken
with a crown of honeysuckle beautiful man that you are a real leader of real
lives who can change the world.

To
many, PACE’s public intervention that Christmas Eve may seem of little
concern. Most of the issues they wished to address for passersby remain
unresolved, such as the war in Iraq. And yet, their presence did not actually
constitute a protest in the sense we understand it from the 1960s. No loud
chants or sloganeering accompanied demands to pull troops from the Middle East.
The most bracing piece—Dinh’s “Planet of the Apes” poem—brought a kind
of incongruence to the situation of holiday shopping. Sherlock’s association
of Iraq with Vietnam came within a holiday greeting card that was passed
directly to individuals who paused from their last minute shopping to receive
the message of peace. And Jagannathan and Conrad’s letters offered
opportunities to reflect on the roles of citizenship and power, relating global
events to decisions made by individuals: they personalized seemingly abstract
social and political topics.

The
social contour between these poets and the shoppers they encountered that day is
suggestive of the public space I described earlier in this essay. Poetry, when
used to negotiate social boundaries and institutional assumptions about public
space, can momentarily bring reflection to bear on municipal, legal, and social
definitions. A public becomes a meaningful space of engagement for artists and
activists in ways impossible to imagine in mass cultural situations. A congruent
and overlapping sense of values moves through the more rigid architecturally
delineated spaces associated with public action. We like to think that the kinds
of public exchanges we encounter every day resolve themselves within neat
coordinates that are defined by the various private and public institutions that
give public life meaning. The edifice of a municipal building reinforces our
sense of civic duty; retail spaces prepare us for the experience of purchase; a
suburban lawn enhances a meditative walk. Variously, the physicality of public
space informs the practical and imagined uses of it, and the possibilities
available to participants in public space tell us much about contemporary social
and political experience. When we encounter messages in such spaces that are
incongruent with our expectations, when some image or text stands out against
the tableau of civic or corporate functionality, we experience, however briefly,
an intrusive claim on attention and on the meaning of the various disciplines
that encode our expectations of reality.

When
individuals who are motivated by social change participate in public
environments they have the potential to produce new meanings that can shape
perspectives on compelling issues relevant to the decision-making processes of
democracy. The poet-activists who met on Christmas Eve in a Philadelphia
shopping district thus contributed to a form of public inquiry that saw new uses
and transformations of market and civic spaces emerge, for they temporarily
claimed the space on behalf of their political beliefs. When one turns attention
to such creative practices—culturally determined spaces such as a shopping
district that can be transformed by new strategies of language, image, and
performance—the problems of public sphere theory arise anew, as questions of
judgment, value, democracy, and citizenship burden any foray onto city sidewalks
and into the imaginations of passersby. Attention at such moments is various,
perhaps, focused on holiday ritual, last minute shopping, the quickest path
forward, or the humanist values that accompany the season. Regardless of
individual motives, some pause, momentarily, to engage another’s note of
ironic tenderness for a president, or the argument handed out in a greeting
card, that finds relation between Baghdad and Vietnam. In the intervals and
pauses afforded by critical reflection, my aim is to point to strategies that
remove institutional and hierarchical barriers and that seek instead to build
common ground within exchanges that can happen when least expected.

What
I hope to get across is that imagining new categories for poetry in no way
serves the more important goals of public engagement. Public spaces have been
ignored for far too long by a romanticized poetics of modernity that shapes
itself by enclosed literary terms and market considerations. Advocates for
poetry (and this must include poets and critics, obviously) are responsible for
shaping social space and enhancing the capacities of others to comprehend what
is new and happening in the art and culture around them. Such a dynamic and
active pursuit gives a sense of possibility and excitement rather than circling
the wagons around ossified identifications and romantic habits of audience
disdain. Poetry will be written and performed the same as always. What changes
is how cultural participants define the value of poetry with strategies that
bring art into a complex array of cultural possibilities. Such potential exists
only insofar as we are willing to imagine the kind of world we hope to inhabit.

Dale
Smith is a poet and scholar who lives in Toronto, Ontario. His book, Poets
Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960, was
recently published by the University of Alabama Press. Other writings have
appeared in Jacket and Jacket2, The Colorado Review, Best
American Poetry, and elsewhere.